dr. J.M. (Jules) van Rooij

Policy career 2000 - present

As senior adviser to the Executive Board of the University of Groningen, one of Dr Jules van Rooij’s main responsibilities is to provide ‘SMART’ information to base the University’s research policy and strategy upon. Since 2005 he coordinates the Assessment & Control of Research Quality as well as the University's Institutional Research (i.e. ‘business intelligence’). As such, he is closely involved in the provision and control of data for QA at the one hand, and in analysing the results of QA for policy and strategy support at the other. Since 2000 he has played an active role in the formulation, evaluation and actualisation of national QA protocols and underlying definitions and databases for research in- and output. He also successfully initiated national collaboration to increase the comparability and decrease the naivety of data provision to international university rankings. He represents his university in several national university platforms and is member of the Dutch Association of Institutional Research (DAIR). His belief in ‘evidence based policy’ stems from his roots in academic research. Before his switch in 2000 to the policy domain, he was postdoctoral fellow at Wageningen University, the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and at the University of Groningen, where his research career started in 1987 with a PhD study on the ecology of parrotfish at a Caribbean coral reef.

Research career 1987-2000

Dr. Jules M. van Rooij studied marine biology at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), where he also obtained his PhD degree (in 1996) on the thesis “Behavioural energetics of the parrotfish Sparisoma viride: flexibility in a coral reef setting”. From 1995 until 2000 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher. First at the department of food web studies of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in an EC project studying the effects of climate change on the ecophysiology of freshwater fish (Perca fluviatilis). And the last 2 years at the department of Aquaculture at Wageningen University in two EC-projects on the improvement of sustainable aquaculture systems for shrimp (in Mexico and Israel) and for herbivorous freshwater fish (in India and Bangladesh). He published 15 papers in peer refereed journals (ORCID 0000-0001-5009-3389).